Patterns of protection and care during a crisis in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure and Idea Factory's Collar x Malice.

Greetings, It's been too long since we have written one of these! I hope you are feeling well as you are reading. First of all, let's take care of business. We are still working on the rest of the ...

Otome, a genre targeted to teenage girls and young women, often shows an unspoken paternalism in what it deems as proper representations of its subject matter for its audience. It’s most obvious in th...

Protagonist Organa is something of a housewife, the invisible labor which makes Irene's organ plant shop function.

A lot of CAVYHOUSE's satirical clicker game Forget-Me-Not: My Organic Garden hinges on the concept of the shadow price. In accountant and poet Farah Ghafoor's debut poetry collection, titled after thi...

Hello readers, First up, we have a couple quick announcements. Our next issue, releasing over the few weeks, will be on the satrical clicker Forget Me Not: My Organic Garden from developer CAVYHOUSE...

Phoenix interviews the artist duo working on the ongoing project +1-home, a multimedia art installation that shows how the concept of home is multifarious and based in kinship across time and space.

Home, an alien ghost hand, pilots Mawsynram, the corpse of a soldier. Mawsynram died, not in combat, but because he drank bad water, the kind of military malfeasance which must haunt bases regardless ...

The polluted island setting of 24 Killers is an effective microcosm for what the interrelationship of home and community could be like. The driver for this speculation is the game's absurdism.

This is the first entry in a new (free) series at TIER.

The interactive fiction game LAKE Adventure, by B.J. Best, is something that must be found and figured out, as well as played.

We've prepared this small survey to poll you on the last year and a half of TIER.

As someone who has moved around a lot, across different states and even countries, I long for the stability of home, a house to call my own. Political and economic situations have dashed my dreams, or...

Amping up retro technological friction encourages the player to decipher an IF game's interface as if it is an alien device with its own "emotional language".

The limitations of Interactive Fiction provide a unique avenue for horror. Text based games cannot replicate the kind of tension that many survival horror games thrive in. The possibilities for emerg...

A digital poem that features both text and interactivity is a type of “Interactive Fiction” in the traditional sense.

Nathalie Lawhead joined us on Zoom to talk about their work, interactive fiction, internet subcultures, social media and lots more.

Just a month before I entered it, I had no idea what the IFComp was.  The year was 2017. I was dealing with a triple-whammy spring season: I broke up with my long-term partner, lost my cat to kidney ...

If anything, outsider art exists because our expectations of art are not at all inclusive. We don't need excuses like historical significance to justify the existence of personal games like Repeat th...

If anything, outsider art exists because our expectations of art are not at all inclusive. We don't need excuses like historical significance to justify the existence of personal games like Repeat th...

At its core, AOTK has an anti-establishment philosophy, much like the avant garde. Especially with its penchant for remixing, and therefore subverting, bourgeois expectations of art objects and texts....

Any place humans have lived in for sufficiently long is haunted.

An Adult Swim game for a more overtly bleak era, using cartoon violence, the surreal, and the absurd to satirize life after the End of History.

SEQUENCEBREAK// is an in-person exhibit of "artist's games," showing until June 28, 2025 at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. It includes work by Stephen Gillmurphy (thecatamites, th...

Lovely Lady RPG's strongest narrative exists in the concept of the void, but the game's self-aware tone often sells itself short.

Even when Lovely Lady RPG strains toward complexity, it cannot leave its clichés behind.

Hey, player. Sometimes, I struggle to understand which world is real.What is a lie? What is the now? Where are the boundaries? Is this a dream? Is this real? Is this my world? What would be best? Mayb...

It is that tender gap, between what is known and what is, between what is felt and what is real, that Heisei explores so vividly.

"It hurts so much, but this is all for you I write a letter to you in my red blood" - Translation of lyrics to "Fushigi Na Shiawase" (Mysterious Happiness) by NejiP feat. Hatsune Miku - From the soun...

TIER is a reader-funded publication, supported entirely through donations and subscriptions. You can support us directly on the site or via our Patreon. Thank you to all who subscribe or otherwise sup...

Heisei Pistol Show (hereafter referred to as Heisei) is a time capsule of a game, full of visual expression that’s closely aligned with principles of Outsider and vent art. As a game about Heart, a fo...

There is something wrong in games media and it cannot be fully explained by deadlines, private equity, or layoffs.

The principal way OVERWHELM builds dread is lack of information.

OVERWHELM is less about punishment and more about vindication. Vindication that sometimes even perseverance, that vanguard of individualist hope in particular, will fail.

Grief is mundane, despite how profound of an emotion and process it is. Grief can also be cumulative and collective.

Carry a corpse out of the hostile, cold air. Stitch together a head wound with a fish hook and fishing line.

Frigg’s time on the island is fleeting, an intentional reminder of the ephemeral nature of oral histories.

“Make everyone think you’re ignorant. Make them think you’re forgetful. Make them think you’re unable to think on your own.”